Editor’s note: Every Sunday after the newest episode of “Mad Men,” lawyer and Supreme Court advocate Walter Dellinger will host an online dialogue about the show. The participants include Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley, Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan, Columbia theater and television professor Evangeline Morphos, and Georgetown Law professor Pam Harris. They will post thoughts after each episode ends at 11 p.m or sometime the next day. Readers are invited to join in with their thoughts in the comments section.

Gwen Orel, Recapper

It’s Mother’s Day at “Mad Men.”

Joan, Peter and Cooper are in a meeting with a banker and we learn the company is exploring the idea of going public. Everyone stands to make a lot of money, and they’re giddy about it. Don’s not there; he’s a hurdle they’ll have to go over.

Dinner with Jaguar is cancelled for Pete but not for Don and Roger, who’s excited Marie is in town.

We see Roger shining his own shoes in his office. His stewardess girlfriend tips him off to go to the airport to meet a delayed exec, pretending to be on the same flight.

Trudy won’t have sex with Pete, who’s home for Mother’s Day, but says she’s taken note of his efforts.

Megan’s visiting mother looks disapproving when Megan signs autographs in the elevator. She tells Megan, who is sulking because of her distance from her husband, that it’s hard to stand next to someone signing autographs. Megan’s mom tells her daughter that her problems are easily solved: she shouldn’t dress like a wife at dinner, and instead she needs to wear something that with stir him sexually.

Peggy and Abe have moved to the West Side. He’s fixing things up when she arrives home from visiting her mother.

Over at Peggy’s firm, things are not going so well. Frank, the artist (and partner), has cancer, he tells Ted. It’s a financial issue too, because the other two have to buy him out. Ted gives him a pep talk. Peggy consoles Ted when she sees him sitting on the floor. Ted kisses her. But she stops him. Later, she pictures Ted when she kisses Abe.

At dinner, Jaguar Herb is there with a giggly blonde, and Roger never shows up– because he’s on a plane. A drunken Marie mocks the idiot and his wife in French. Herb wants Don to look at flyers a kid on his lot has made. Don begs off the account. At home, Don immediately takes his wife to bed. Mom knows best.

Roger calls to talk to Don and Marie hangs up on him. Twice.

Bob takes Pete to a mod bordello. Who’s there but Trudy’s father, with a black prostitute. The next day, Jaguar and SCDP cut ties. Pete falls down the stairs in a fury and yells at Don,. “Do you know that we had a public offering underway and now it’s ruined!” he shouts. The staff hears, before Joanie ushers them both inside. Just then Roger appears. He has good news: they’re giving a presentation on Chevy’s new car. Pete’s still mad, and so is Joan, because of what she had to go through. “Just once, I’d like to hear you use the word ‘we,’” she says.

There’s a meeting of all the creatives. Don’s in a good mood.

Iin the elevator, Arnold tells Don he just quit his job, because a kid who needed a heart is dead, and he lost his place in history.

Both Roger and Don are at the airport class lounge, and meet rival admen there. An adman coughs and pretends they don’t have a cough drop– his way of letting them know Vick chemical has dropped them. That’s Pete’s father-in-law. Pete goes to see him, but Tom says Pete makes him sick. Pete tells Trudy all about it, and she kicks him out for good.

Ted bumps into Don at the bar in Detroit. Ted says two little guys are DOA. “This business is rigged,” Don sighs. They show each other their campaigns and propose a merger. Ted calls Peggy in, and she’s surprised to see Don sitting there. Together, they won Chevy. And they merged, Don says, furniture, fixtures, everything. They’re asking her if she wants to come along. “Congratulations,” Don says. Ted says he wants her to write the press release.

Before we begin discussing this week’s episode of “Mad Men,” I wanted to back up for just a minute, and address the barrage of criticism that’s been aimed at Betty in the commentary about last week’s outing.

Everyone knows that there’s a lot of hostility out there toward Betty. But I thought last week’s commentary was especially blinkered in its take on Betty’s behavior — almost stubbornly unwilling to consider that Betty might be anything but an object of ridicule and contempt.

Well, that changes everything! This was, for me, one of the best episodes of this show ever. It certainly shows the peril of passing judgment on a season too soon. So far this season, the SCDP agency had seemed stuck in neutral. But all that was merely stage setting for tonight’s truly remarkable bit of directing. acting and storycraft. For the first time this season I thought as the credits rolled that I can’t wait to see the next episode. Everyone seems revived. Bert Cooper is pulling strings again, Roger is showing how, um, imaginative business development can be, and Don demonstrates once again his old creative spark in suggesting weeks of ads that don’t (yet) show the car.

The third generation Chevy Corvette (I presume) is about to be unveiled to America and Don Draper and Ted Chaough will own the account. That is the end result of the most tumultuous week since the formation of Sterling Cooper Draper Price, a week marked by partners competing in secret from one another to define the future of the firm. The somewhat strange duo of Bert Cooper and Peter Campbell are on the cusp of taking SCDP public; Don’s ego is losing Jaguar; Pete’s you-know-what is losing Vick’s; Don and Roger are making a bold play for Chevy; and in the end it is Don and Ted Chaough who join forces in a way that will turn the rest of the season upside down.

Joan has her finest moment in the entirely of the series, as she turns on Don for what she was willing to sacrifice for the agency and what little he was willing to tolerate himself from the intolerable Herb Rennet. Once again she occupies the moral center of Mad Men. (Will Hell for Herb will be a dinner with Peaches Rennet that lasts for all eternity?) Pete once again shows how deeply flawed a human being he is.

Most of all, the episode leaves us with the best set of questions yet. What will become of Pete in the new agency? What will become of Pete, period? How will Ted and Don determine who is top dog? What will become of Ted and Peggy? Peggy and Abe? Don and Peggy? Peggy and Joan? Is this the end or the beginning of a great ad agency?

And, as the dust settles on the remaking of SCDP, I am wondering what folks think of Pam Harris’s provocative defense of Betty Draper, and her suggestion that our attitudes toward Betty say a lot about the place of women in our current social psyche?

As we learned in season four, whenever a character in Mad Men utters the line “Shut the door”—the audience is in for a narrative ride. In this episode, each character at SCDP is engaged in a stratagem for saving the agency, and behind closed doors plots are being laid. The first scene starts with the energetic clicking of an adding machine, as Bert, Pete and Joan plot with an investment banker to take SCDP public; Roger inventively plots with a hostess at the VIP airport lounge to tip him off whenever corporate executives are flying into New York; and at the end of the episode Don and Ted plot to merge their firms in order to win the Chevy account. These new alliances create unexpected dynamics among the characters that is thrilling.

This episode is not one of boozy, soul-searching nights, nor of brooding disengagement, nor of suburban angst—no, Don Draper’s cocktail world is being shaken not stirred.

Changes are about to take place, and money is about to change hands. The episode is an up and down roller coaster of accounts being lost and won, relationships destroyed and forged, and plans falling apart and coming together.

Don is once again the touchstone for the type of change that is taking place in the story. In the beginning of the episode, Joan wonders how Don will react to the company going public: “Don doesn’t care about money,” she says. Pete answer is “…but he’s tired of playing in the bush leagues.” The rest of the episode is about Don’s desire to follow a bigger dream.

The merger that is about to shake up SCDP comes about as a sudden bolt of imagination from Don. (Earlier in the episode Pete has criticized Don’s spontaneity as arbitrary: “Don’t act like you have a plan…You’re like Tarzan swinging from tree to tree.”) But Don’s impulse at the bar is about saving not only the agency, but his own creativity.

There is no image of the car that Chevy has asked SCDP to create an ad campaign for; but Don doesn’t really need one. Don’s creative genius has always been in creating a desire for something the public doesn’t even know it wants. His ad campaign for Chevy is simple: “The future is something you haven’t even thought of yet.”

Walter is right–the energy in this episode is as much about Matt Weiner revitalizing the narrative as it is about Don Draper re-vitalizing the agency. This episode is a signal to the audience to expect some surprises in future storylines.

Abe expresses a hopefulness about the future: “Everything is getting better…Johnson’s gone, the war is going to end. We are going to have a new President.” Even if that new President turns out to be Richard Nixon–and it will–things will be interesting.

By the way–Have the rest of you noticed that the sexually charged atmosphere of SCDP has given way to a mid-marriage bickering? Pete and Don hurl counter-charges at each other as to who is ruining the agency; Pete emerges from a joyless session with a prostitute (Call me “Curious George”) only to confront his father-in-law; and Roger’s romp with a first-impression stewardess, turns out to be part of a desperate comedic business strategy involving a fight-lounge hostess. It even evokes shades of mid-life Willy Loman” mid-life business failure in Death of a Salesman. (The floosy Willy Loman has taken up to his hotel room says: “From now on, whenever you come to the office, I’ll see you go right through to the buyers. No waiting at my desk any more, Willy.”)

The sexual/business ennui even pervades the rival ad agency, and Ted is inspired to kiss Peggy because she calls him “strong,” rather than “nice”; and Don’s mid-night “go-get-em, boy” oral sex from Megan is really just a break before he goes back to the office to work on the Chevy account.

Even Don’s actual marriage has that tired feeling. Megan’s mother comments: “You look like a woman who’s been married longer than you have been.”

These partnerships–and even these actual marriages–need spicing up! Megan’s glittering go-go dress, and the new merger are just the thing.

I’m mostly with Walter and Evangeline on this great episode. It’s hard not to be swept along by the giddy energy at the end, as Don and Ted join forces to win the car campaign of Don’s dreams. And, yes, Walter, it’s hard not to look forward with something like glee to seeing how all of these abruptly rearranged relationships play out. (I thought that bit with Peggy coming to Ted’s office very much expecting one thing and finding Don, instead — talk about your mood-killers — and then struggling to absorb her new reality, was one of the funniest in Mad Men history. And she’s the one, as she just told Abe, who doesn’t like change!)

And yet — I can’t help but feel some trepidation, too. Walter and Evangeline, you both were struck by Don’s Chevy campaign — the one that doesn’t even show the car, because the strongest and most powerful response comes from imagining a car, not from engaging with its reality. At least, that’s what Don said, more or less, when he unveiled the exact same approach in his ketchup-less ad for Heinz: There’s nothing better than the product you can’t even see, than the future you haven’t even imagined. And that’s Don Draper in a nut-shell, right? No reality can measure up to the irresistible tug of the imagined next best thing, whether it’s a quickie marriage to your cipher of a secretary or a quickie merger with your former professional rival.

Peggy calls Don a pessimist tonight, and I think she’s mostly right. But Don is also a kind of an optimist-of-last-resort; he still thinks that when things get bad enough — when he’s so fouled his reality that even he can’t bear the stink — he can reinvent himself one more time and move into some imagined new future. As I was watching tonight’s episode, I caught myself wondering, “How many times can Matthew Wiener go to this ‘let’s start a new firm!’ well?” But that has it all wrong, I think. What if Matthew Wiener is the one posing the question, and the question is: How many times can Don go to this reinvention well? How many chances does Don get to reinvent himself, personally or professionally? And can he ever get it right, finally leaving behind the history and the pathologies that so far have dogged every effort at a fresh start?

Maybe I’m the pessimist here. But all I know is that this episode, so much about the idea of the future, gave us exactly one concrete prediction about what that future would bring. And that would be Abe’s, as Evangeline notes, so confident, in May of 1968, that the “war is ending” and that there soon will be a new President: ”Maybe McCarthy, worst-case scenario Kennedy.” For me, that was an almost unbearably poignant and painful moment — that gap between Abe’s imagined future and the reality we know is coming, between Abe’s idea of a “worst-case scenario” involving Robert Kennedy and the actual worst-case scenario that is about to unfold, in just a month, in Los Angeles. After a scene like that, it’s hard for me to be entirely optimistic about Don’s latest embrace of the imagined future.

I’ll have more for you later — ironically, the i-tunes download of “For Immediate Release” won’t fully release itself — but in the meantime, based on the first third or so plus your comments, a couple of things:

1. Marie Calvet tells Megan if she wants to attract her husband’s attention, she should stop dressing like a wife. Was it that, or firing Herb Rennet, that explains Don pushing Megan up against the wall as soon as they got home? And wasn’t Marie’s performance at the dinner marvelous?

2. For Immediate Release. Obviously a reference to public relations (The title, by the way, of the opening episode of Season 4 and the real beginning of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce). But did any of you think it was a double entendre as well, what with Don and Megan, and then the scene with Pete Campbell and his father-in-law Tom Vogel at the party house? And what’s with Pete taking Bob along?

3. As for agency mergers, I remember there being a joke about how one day, there would be just one agency, and the receptionist would answer the phone “Agency.” And are law firms and advertising agencies the last two businesses where nearly every one is named for the partners?

4. And on Pam Harris’s wonderful lead off: I agree with your point about the blame-the-victim mentality with Betty, especially after the last two episodes. We now find out that Don was not just faking an identity, but also faking a feeling about fatherhood. And remember in Signal 30 from Season 5 when the SCDP trio took Edwin from Jaguar to the memorable encounter with the chewing gum at the party house, that in the cab ride afterwards Don told Pete that if he’d met Megan first, he’d have known not to throw it away? Well, he’s doing it again. Betty was not his problem.

It’s 1968, and everyone at SCDP is expecting that the agency will be going public. They think they’ll be getting millions, but it never happens. Somehow, SCDP seems to have become stagnant. The Mad Men at SCDP have already discovered that things are becoming more difficult. Pete is angry at everyone, including his wife, his father-in-law, and especially Don. Pete’s future doesn’t look good. Joan is furious, afraid of losing what little part of the agency she has. “Don doesn’t care about money,” she says angrily. Peggy is finding CGC slowing down, becoming pessimistic just as SCDP did.

Abe, on the other hand, is optimistic about the future – despite his and Peggy’s new, dismal apartment. Abe says things are getting better. Lyndon Johnson will be gone. Eugene McCarthy might become president, or maybe Bobby Kennedy. But things will not get better. Bobby Kennedy will be assassinated in June. McCarthy will never become president and will disappear from politics. Within months, Nixon will be in his dark presidency. The economy is slowly moving into the long inflation. The great prosperity since 1945 is moving toward its end.

Prosperity, however, seems to be coming around the corner to SCDP. Roger, as always, is catting as usual; but he and Bert always keep coming back with something new that might (or might not) work. This time things seem to be working. Roger engineers a chance at the Chevy account. When a sleepless Don sees Ted Chaough, the head of CGC in an empty bar late at night he realizes that they are in competition for the same account; and that their small agencies aren’t able to stand up to the larger competition. They come up with a plan to merge the two agencies, implausibly, in the middle of the night without telling anyone else in the agency. They ask Peggy to announce the merger, now SCDP-CGC, worrying about the big company that is looming ahead.

Don is always looking for a big play, and so does Ted. They both know that the small boutique agencies aren’t going to last very long, that the agency was stuck with small accounts.

Everyone in the two agencies will discover this remarkable change the next morning, while Don and Ted take a huge risk, certain that their own brilliance will turn everything upside down. It’s a great leap for Mad Men, just at the moment they needed it.

Starting at about 8 minutes into the first episode of Season 6, Don meets a soldier at the bar. It's late at night and the man is clearly drunk. I can't believe nobody pointed out the parallel between that scene and the scene with Ted Chaough when they decide to merge at the bar in Detroit.
In that original scene at the bar, the drunk soldier asks Don, "You some kinda astronaut?" - Recall the scene where Ted learns of his partners cancer. Before his partner walks out the door he says, "Everybody loves astronauts."
Again, another repeat from that first episode, the drunk soldier says to Don, "Lieutenant, what do you say we get into some trouble?"
Don repeats this in the bar scene with Ted saying, "Hey lieutenant, wanna get into some trouble?"
Don and Ted are the astronauts. They are pretty much going into uncharted territory just as in about a year from the current time period of the show, NASA lands on the moon. Something big is happening on Madison Avenue and the world may be less pessimistic than it seems.

7:47 am May 13, 2013

lia wrote:

about last night...i found myself cheering on ted ! hurray, peggy, however, ted took care of don when he flew over the clouds with a smirk on his face.
poor pete, nothing is going well for him.if anything, he may develop a health issue.
bob is staying.joan proved to be the best person to latch on to.
poor megan, don is bored.
a first time viewer might see this episode and ask why do we all like don and this series?

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.